The ancestry of words is distinctive among areas of human curiosity because it is marked by 1) an astonishing amount of knowledge, and 2) an astonishing amount of codswallop. Here are some examples from an e-mail circulating under the title For Trivia Buffs: The History of Phrases: “In Shakespeare’s time mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer. That’s where the phrase ‘Goodnight, sleep tight’ came from.

“It was the practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding the bride’s father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer, and because the calendar was lunar-based, this period was called the ‘honey month’ – what we know today as the ‘honeymoon’.”

Each of these tall tales could have been debunked with a glance at a dictionary. Generally the real etymologies are less colourful than the folk ones. Tight means “steadily and securely,” as in sit tight; honeymoon alludes to a metaphorical sweetness that wanes like the moon. But sometimes they are more colorful than anything a lexical counterfeiter could dream up. Speakers have a variety of impromptu ways of retooling their words. These devices can be spotted in any list of new words. The 2005 “Words of the Year” list from the Macmillan English Dictionary is, in effect, a tutorial on all the ways that people create new words: Prefixing: deshopping, “to buy something intending to use it once, then return it for a refund”. Suffixing: Whovian, “a fan of the British sci-fi series Doctor Who”. Changing the part of speech, ie, turning a noun or an adjective into a verb: supersize, “to provide an out-size version”. Compounding: gripesite, “a website that makes consumers aware of deficient goods and services”. Borrowing from another language: wiki, “a website where users can collectively add or modify text” [from a Hawaiian word for “quick”]. Acronyms: ICE, “In case of emergency contact number stored in the address book of a mobile phone”. Truncation: fanfic, “new stories featuring characters and settings from a movie, book or TV show, written by fans, not the original author”. Portmanteau (combining the start of one word with the end of another): spim [spam + im], “unwanted adverts sent via instant messaging”. Metaphor: zombie, “a PC infected by a virus that makes it send out spam without the user’s knowledge”. Metonym: 7/7, “terrorist bombing” [from the attacks in the London Underground on July 7, 2005].

The most obvious source of a new root is onomatopoeia, a word that resembles what its referent sounds like, as in oink, tinkle, barf, conk and woofer and tweeter. But onomatopoeia is pretty limited in what it can do. It applies only to noisy things, and even there the resemblance is mostly in the ear of the beholder.

Somewhat handier than pure onomatopoeia is sound symbolism, whereby a word’s pronunciation merely reminds people of an aspect of the referent. Long words may be used for things that are big or coarse, staccato words for things that are sharp or quick, words pronounced deep in the mouth or throat for things that took place long ago or far away (compare this and that, near and far, here and there). And if I told you that the Chinese words for “heavy” and “light” were pronounced qìng (with a high tone) and zhòng (with a falling tone), you would be right in thinking that qìng means light and zhòngmeans heavy.

Onomatopoeia and sound symbolism are the seeds of a more pervasive phenomenon in language called phonesthesia, in which families of words share a teeny snatch of sound and a teeny shred of meaning. Many words with the sound sn-, for example, have something to do with the nose, presumably because you can almost feel your nose wrinkle when you pronounce it. They include words for the nose itself (snout), words for nose-like instruments (snorkel), words for actions and things that are associated with the nose (sneeze, sniff, sniffle, snivel, snore, snort, snotand snuff), and words for looking down your nose at someone (snarky, sneer, snide, snippy, snob, snook, snooty, snotty and snub).

Now that we have an inkling of where the sounds of new words come from, we come to the puzzle of which meanings are seen as needing a sound. New words should materialise to fill a lexical gap: a concept that every one wants to express, but for which le mot juste does not yet exist. One has only to overhear the jargon of a specialty – photography, skate-boarding, hip-hop, any academic field – to appreciate that lexical suppliers will step in to meet a demand.

But many gaps in the language simply refuse to be filled: a gender-neutral third-person pronoun to replace he or she; a term for one’s adult children; the early-morning insomnia in which your bladder is too full to allow you to fall back to sleep but you are too tired to get up to go the lavatory. The comedian Rich Hall gave us the word sniglet (an example of itself) for a word that should exist but does not. Eg, Elbonics n. The actions of two people manoeuvering for one arm-rest in a cinema. Peppier n. A waiter whose sole purpose seems to be asking diners if they want ground pepper. Furbling v. Having to go through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank even if you’re the only person in line. Phonesian n. Dialling a phone number and forgetting whom you were calling just as they answer.

Barbara Wallraff inverted the formula in Word Fugitives, a history of recreational word-coining and a collection of her columns by that name in The Atlantic Monthly, in which one reader submits a lexical gap and others try to fill it: Saying something to your child, then realising that you sound like one of your own parents: déjà vieux, mamamorphosis, mnemomic, patter-familias, vox pop, nagativism, parentriloquism. The moment when you should introduce two people but can’t remember one of their names: whomnesia, persona non data, nomenclutchure, mumbleduction, introducking. The confusion experienced by everyone in the vicinity when a mobile phone rings and no one is sure if it is his/hers: conphonesion, phonundrum, ringchronicity, ring-xiety, pandephonium.

But most recreationally coined words rarely become permanent. Most sniglets are too clever for their own good, destined to amuse rather than last. Interesting neologisms tend to fail precisely because they are interesting – not because their construction is clever but because the coiner is really commenting on something, not naming something. Take words such as egosurfing(googling oneself), infomania (obsessively checking for e-mail and text messages) and übersexual (a heterosexual male who is masculine yet sensitive and socially aware): they are reports on social trends. You can almost feel the compiler nudging you in the ribs as if to say, “Look how our lives are being revolutionised by the internet!” – or by changing sex roles.

The sniglets and their relatives, for their part, are really saying, “Don’t you hate it when . . .? ” or “Isn’t it silly that . . .?” Indeed, by packing one of these aperçus into a single word, the coiners are commenting on their comments, saying: “This phenomenon is so common and recognisable that it should have a word of its own!” It is this exploitation of the psychology of wordhood, as much as the punning, that gives sniglets their drollness. It also makes them bad as words. But even with all this knowledge, we still can’t predict when a new word will take root.

— Buy The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker, published on September 27

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